POLITICS AND THE BATTERED WOMAN

...There is a built-in uncertainty, by definition, in homosexual liaisons...

...Schechter's text can be read, for example, as an implicit rebuttal of the line of feminist thinking, now apparently in retreat, that derided an unpaid effort, blasting volunteerism as just another instance of female selflessness...

...all men...

...One senses an evasion here...

...Of her 13 chapters, 8 burst with a profusion of detail as she traces the origins and growth, the trials, tribulations, and achievements of the movement...

...Schechter admits that such violence exists, and she calls for more study of the problem...

...Violence against women is rooted in "male domination" and/or "male-dominated capitalist society...

...I agree that "solutions are hard to find," but this difficulty should not justify a refusal to think about the abuses inherent in extending therapeutic powers and responsibilities to the state as part of its policing function...

...She documents efforts on behalf of battered women that, since 1974, have resulted in "over 300 shelters, 48 state coalitions or service providers, a national grass-roots organization, and a multitude of social and legal reforms...

...Throughout her book, Schechter rejects the suggestion that there is any "equality" in abuse of the sort hinted at by such formulations as Ibid., p. 479...

...The first is a prefeminist "socially induced silence" in which the entire system is geared to keeping violent families intact, enveloped in a shroud of privacy...

...Well-established cultural paradigms are brought to bear to construct wifebattering as a social problem...

...This reminder ("in the family way") of familial 58 responsibilities and constraints in the absence of supportive structures is, it seems, more likely to become one source of dismay, fear, loathing, and subsequent eruption...

...Patriarchalism, historically, got intertwined "with the needs of capitalism," thus unambivalently reinforcing male violence...

...but that is a posture Schechter's evidence, if not her own analysis, reinforces...

...Schechter closes off possible explanatory routes save for evoking "false consciousness," the mimicry by lesbians and gays of the patterns of heterosexual society...

...For there are cycles of attention just as there appears to be a rising and falling in the incidence of battering itself...

...The nuances here call to mind Jane Addams's essay "On the Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements," in which Addams traced the reciprocities linking educated, middle-class female reformers with undereducated, underclass immigrants...

...Schechter estimates that approximately 2 million American women are battered annually...

...Because Schechter assumes a simple unity between capitalism and patriarchy, she cannot get to first base with this part of the problem...

...But the way she frames the issue— "Why are men violent and what role does violence play in women's oppression...

...II Schechter's failure to draw out the implications of her densely packed narrative is not the most serious problem with Women and Male Violence...

...In Schechter's new society, family life would be open for community scrutiny because the family would be part of and accountable to the community...

...A welfare "client," by contrast, is locked into a static dependency on agencies and experts, leaving little room for transformation...

...III Finally, Schechter's proposed solutions to male violence against women are deeply infected by her acceptance of a reified vision of that violence...

...Recently in Nebraska," the account relates, "a woman tried to walk to a shelter for battered women that she had heard about...

...She praises what so far, in her view, has been accomplished by women who worked, for example, to overturn the need for corroborative evidence in rape cases, finding in such efforts a good beginning toward reform of the criminal justice system...

...Just 30 pages after her paean to the intrusive communities of the reconstructed future, for example, she states unequivocally that "whom women choose as emotional and sexual partners cannot be open for public scrutiny"—an embrace of the public/private distinction and the possibility for concealment at odds with her image of the new society...

...A now empowered political person, who has overcome her victimization, can move to transform a situation that demeans and threatens her...

...This does not hold where the victimized party is male: it is more difficult, given our cultural lens, for us to "see" this problem, and Schechter's theoretical edifice disallows attending to it at all...

...One way or another, the "permanent dependence of women and children on agency support" was guaranteed, though often without dissolving an ongoing connection to the violent spouse...

...She is right to do so, given her project...

...Addams understood that the solution to her own problems of self-identity and purpose lay in the creation of a movement that would connect her with others in complex ways...

...SOME FASCINATING QUESTIONS suggest themselves...

...One persistent theme running through Schechter's text is the impact of the antiprofessional suspicions of the movement's founders— who marked a vast difference between their participatory politics and the politics of bureaucratic and paternalistic liberalism...

...Schechter sees but two broad reactions to what she takes as a brute given of social life (or, at least, of "male-dominant, capitalist society...

...Schechter goes on to endorse old laws against wife-beating and to urge creation of new ones...

...A welfare "client" is construed as a consumer of services whose case is "managed" by a professional...

...This is the way matters stand unless or until Schechter, and the many feminists who share her theoretical presumptions, tell us how the future community of scrutiny will preserve any freedom worthy of the name...

...Such historic shifts fall through the grid of Schechter's analysis...

...The usual role expectations and unconsciously operating "checks and balances," the playing off of "rights" and "prerogatives," cannot be so easily wheeled into place...

...But a victim of battering is seen by the movement as a woman who can reconstitute her identity in ways that will socially and politically "empower" her...

...Their existence as victims points to the reason for her own commitment and simultaneously reinforces a perspective that construes men and families as violent, women as victimized, and so on...

...To her credit, she alerts us to possible racist use of the rape charge, but she offers no way of instilling that awareness in the law...

...Boston: South End Press, 1982...

...Schechter falls victim to a tendency to ignore variation between societies, to see in our patterns of gender identity and relation a universal given, and to obscure complex social determinations by construing male dominance as an immutable (or nearly so) feature of the human landscape...

...Schechter quotes an account by an activist that portrays the extreme isolation of many rural women and the additional problem this poses in cases of battering and abuse...

...I would suggest the following interpretation as a way of understanding the difference, respectively, between the client/case worker and the activist/victim relationships...

...More aptly, it has once again become a public concern...

...But her text falters badly when it comes to general arguments about state intervention in and explanations for wife battering...

...For her, male domination, or patriarchy, constitutes a theoretical and political Nte noire: all women vs...

...In this matter of activists vs...

...Schechter highlights tensions within the movement with admirable candor...

...We must, as part of the interim strategy, expand the arrest powers of the police and strip the courts of their "sexist blinders," so that they see women as a special legal category requiring special protections...

...Growing out of the heritage of the 1960s New Left, movement activists, initially nearly all middleclass and well-educated, were suspicious of political models revolving around a policymaking and -implementing elite and a subordinate group of dependent "clients...

...between protecting the vulnerable and binding up their wounds, on the one hand, and politicizing those same individuals in an avowedly feminist direction and sending them forth to challenge the status quo, on the other...

...She had walked nearly halfway with her small children on back roads when she came to a town that had a volunteer task force on domestic violence, which arranged for her transportation...

...I cannot enter here upon a full critique of the concept of "reeducation...

...In a chilling way, rage that erupts into violence may aim for clarity on this question...

...Male battering of women is now a public concern...

...This initial perception, and the radically participatory ethos of the early phase of the movement, set the stage for later struggles over the hiring of professional staff, assimilation of shelters to extant service networks, and the loss of autonomy that came with government funding...

...Schechter goes no further in specifying how this robust communitarian world—a future perfect Gemeinschaft—is to be generated out of a Hobbesian battlefield...

...If a false separation did not exist between the family and the community, women might lose their sense of isolation and gain a sense of entitlement to a violence-free life...

...must be on hand to plan the economy, redistribute resources, and so on (given her commitment to socialism), but this is not spelled out...

...This part of her book is zestful political history...

...professionals, Schechter rejects the provider/client model of social work and welfare—the language of "clients" and "cases...

...If it is true that women, though the prime target of beatings, display a domestic homicide rate nearly as high as that of men, we confront some curious twists and turns in the tale...

...It is unclear whether, in her view, such a society would be democratic or whether, indeed, there would be any politics at all...

...to make such a case, demonstrating how capitalism and liberalism historically have undermined the bases of traditional patriarchal authority...

...Stark, Flitcraft, and Frazier, "Medicine and Patriarchal Violence," p. 480...

...As a result, the shelter becomes like a landlord rather than a trusted friend...

...The key to this shift from denial to eruption, she goes on, lies in the women's movement itself, specifically in the recognition that what happened between men and women "in the privacy of their home was deeply political...

...4) How does one explain evidence that women attack and kill men "almost as frequently as they are attacked and killed" by men?' Schechter slides past the problem of female violence by asserting that many "women have no alternative but to kill a spouse" in self-defense...

...This analysis also invites a more developed critique of bureaucratic, welfare-state liberalism from a participatory and feminist perspective...

...A Evan Stark, Anne Flitcraft, and William Frazier set the figures at this higher level in "Medicine and Patriarchal Violence: The Social Construction of a 'Private' Event," International Journal of Health Services 9 (1979), 3:461-93...

...Susan Schechter, Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women's Movement...

...The politics of the battered women's movement brings together a number of vital concerns: the role of the state in intimate relations, feminist analyses of male violence and power, and the ways political activists and professional "social service providers" variously define and intervene in social problems...

...Underneath the statistics are human realities that evoke pity and terror...

...in denying that complexity, Schechter evades a number of problems for political life and thought...

...Although the reflective self-consciousness of an Addams is rare, then and now, the activist/victim nexus highlighted by the movement holds open the possibility for mutual selfrevelation and change that is absent from the client/provider relation...

...This problem is now severe enough that specific shelters to handle it have been set up in several cities...

...Few would deny that one cannot insulate the family from its wider social surroundings...

...She sees, for example, a "nightmare" in the New York City case in which city officials undermined the autonomy of shelter programs by "forcing each battered woman to be verified by a welfare center as eligible for shelter and by giving each shelter resident a two-party welfare check which must be turned over to the shelter to pay for the residents' food and rent...

...But they ought to do more: they should put pressure on those socialist and feminist visions of a future that project more, and better, what we've got—a more thorough-going welfare system, more and wider-ranging social services, and so on...

...dehistoricizes and abstractly universalizes the issue...

...But women are "equal" when it comes to spouse killing, where weapons compensate for disparities of strength...

...4 This implies that we are not looking at an intrinsic feature of family life but at a likely or possible outcome of family privatization, given the breakdown of social constraints and supports for families...

...Although this by no means exhausts the complexities of the relationship between movement activists and battered women who use the shelters, it does raise an important question...

...Others put the figures even higher—at between 3 and 4 million.' What do we make of this social fact...

...What categories are available to sustain the kinds of impulses to which the battered women's movement is a response...

...At least in traditional communities there was room for backsliders, town drunks, loners, dreamers, and harmless eccentrics...

...This is a potent doctrine, but it begs too many questions and obscures too many aspects of the problem of violence in general and violence against women in particular...

...This is the narrative that unfolds...

...The value of Susan Schechter's Women and Male Violence lies, first, in the fact that it is a detailed and useful, if celebratory, look at the battered women's movement and, second, that it raises questions for political thinking that Schechter, however, fails to develop or treat adequately.' Schechter, who describes herself as a "social worker" turned "activist," wants to get the record down before it is recast by those who may not share her socialist/feminist commitments...

...Hannah Arendt argues that violence appears "where power is in jeopardy...

...It was 150 miles from her home...

...With every aspect of life opened up for community inspection, she prescribes a world I find singularly unattractive...

...1) "As many as half the American women battered each year have no blood or legal ties to the men who assault them," write Stark, Flitcraft, and Frazier in "Medicine and Patriarchal Violence" (p...

...Areas of disputation and discord grew up around race, sexual identity, children, and ideological cleavage...

...The reader who finds Schechter's explanatory framework thin is invited to think things through in some alternative manner...

...Exploration of the decreased sociality of families might also help us to understand why the battered woman is three times more likely to be pregnant than the unbattered woman...

...Taking another tack, and seeing violence not as the expression of secure domination but as an attempt to assert or gain control, or as signifying the fear of losing control, we can more readily make something intelligible of homosexual violence...

...She also vows to "topple theories of psychopathology and the intergenerational transmission of family violence, thereby refuting the notion that professionals who subscribe to such theories know more about battered women than feminist activists...

...But her insistence that violence is the way men express and shore up their domination over women makes it difficult to understand instances of violence in nonheterosexual unions...

...This is unfortunate because one might be able 3 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), p. 56...

...Hence battering is an integral part of women's oppression...

...Communitybased institutions could hear complaints and dispense justice, and community networks could hold individuals accountable for their behavior and offer protection to women...

...In Western industrial societies social historians have located cycles, periods of ebb and flow, in domestic violence...

...A strong and supple theory should help to account for detail and complexity...

...Yet we know that the phenomenon of the battered woman is not a pregiven of social life...

...Movement spokeswomen perceived long-standing "professional arrogance and indifference toward battered women...

...A movement that aims to give "women back their lives and dignity" may not warrant the "unequivocal praise" Schechter calls for, but it deserves both praise and recognition from all those concerned with the creation of political space, the development of participatory capacities, and fundamental human decency...

...It is difficult in our political climate to oppose Reaganomics, yet to be critical, simultaneously, of many features of welfare-state liberalism...

...The feminist volunteer, who may be working up to 16 hours a day in a shelter, is "needed" by women who seek refuge from violence...

...3) Why does violence occur in lesbian and gay relationships...

...Battering is a tool of male power and the self-conscious and purposeful outgrowth of that power...

...While Schechter's interim program relies heavily on a state's policing apparatus she otherwise condemns or suspects, her solution to the problem of ending violence against women once and for all requires "a total restructuring of society that is feminist, antiracist, and socialist...

...This suggests that violence may well be a major symptom of familial breakups at a time of widespread social dislocation rather than a constant feature of secure relationships in stable settings...

...But she also "needs" them...

...Although she nods in the direction of these very demanding concerns, Schechter is frustratingly silent on several further implications of her brief against the professionalization of the movement...

...indeed, she sees power and violence as opposites.' Whether one chooses to develop or challenge Arendt's claim, one must reject the simplistic assimilation of power to violence that Schechter offers...

...Matters get muddled as Schechter describes a potpourri of proposals offered by "other feminists" and "most activists...

...But if we were to take this characterization seriously, we would have to underscore the privatizing tendencies of modern life that push toward insularity, atomism, and the breaking of long-term social connections...

...There 59 is something of a paradox here...

...If violence is not so much an expression of secure domination as a signifier of a fear of losing control or a desire to reassert it, the vulnerability of men to a stripping away of their dignity in periods of unemployment, for example, deepens our understanding of the inner tie between violence and economic forces...

...Schechter shies away from this task in part because she sees the need for feminists to use the state instrumentally to protect women and punish men...

...Schechter succeeds in the first of these aims...

...Schechter recognizes this when she proffers her solution to the problem of male violence (see below), but her theoretical schema affords little space for such awareness conceptually...

...Schechter's frequently off-hand notice of possible civil rights concerns in matters of behavior modification is troubling...

...Although she observes that expanded "discretionary powers of arrest" may give rise to new abuse of the poor and Third World peoples, she is prepared to take that chance even as she sounds the alarm...

...Stripped of ties to neighborhood, place, and a network of kin and friends, the isolated family becomes an emotional cauldron, a privatizing prison...

...I DOUBT whether Schechter has really considered the implications of her argument...

...Earlier social reformers saw the alternative to domestic violence in making women and children wards of the state...

...The second is the emergence of a national battered women's movement ("Suddenly . . . desperately...

...In Schechter's society of scrutiny, total accountability and instant justice, the social space for difference, indifference, dissent, and refusal is squeezed out...

...But in making this argument she reverts to a social learning theory she has rejected earlier as a possible explanation for male violence against women...

...Her presumption of a universal condition with grand causal efficacy lacks subtlety and historical depth...

...2) Schechter proclaims the family a social and political, not just a preciously private, institution...

...spouse battering" or "spouse abuse...

...But let me just mention Arendt's brief attack on those who call upon science to manipulate and control our "instincts" in the interest of social amity...

...Schechter's work would have been richer had she developed an analysis of the tension between creating a sanctuary and constituting 56 a political space...

...Although she fails to develop her criticism, one might point out how the battered women's movement sees those it serves very differently from descriptions cast in welfare "bureaucratese...

...To see female violence as wholly "reactive," as Schechter does, is to perpetuate our "normal" cultural expectations in an interesting way...

...For battering appears "only when persons have been forcibly isolated from potentially supportive kin and peer relations and virtually locked into family situations...

...Perhaps we would come closer to understanding male violence against women if we explored the unraveling of "male authority" in diverse epochs, often linked to brutal vagaries in the political economy...

...By helping the victim to place her individual suffering within a social and political framework, activists hope to set the stage for possible shifts in self-perception...

...Arendt reminds us that violence may sometimes be a remedy to particular, dire situations (her example is Billy Budd), but, and more important, that our capacity for rage and violence is part of a complex repertoire of "human emotions, and to cure man of them would mean nothing less than to dehumanize or emasculate him...

...55 perspectival jolt, a grass-roots feminist response to victimization—and its very success, in turn, prompts professionals (social workers, funding agencies, government bureaucracies) to legitimate the effort, at the same time threatening to strip it of its original raison d'etre, its participatory elan, and its way of creating political identity...

...484...

...There seem to be some loose theoretical threads dangling here...

...It is unclear where she stands with reference, say, to advocacy of "mandated counseling" to condition the behavior of violent men or of "court-mandated, antisexist counseling and education programs" coupled with compulsory punishment for second offenses...

...Presumably some sort of state apparatus 6 Arendt, On Violence, p. 64...

...The possibility of male victimization and female aggression defies received presumptions and consequently is not reinforced by police, medical, legal, and mental-health structures...

...Other institutions—economic, social, cultural, political—are reinforced by and in turn reinforce all forms of "exploitation, including class, ethnic, and religious ones...

...I SHALL BRING FORWARD four concrete questions concerning men, women, and violence in order to show how Schechter's theoretical structure fails as the basis for a provocative or compelling exploration...

...Schechter tends to round up the usual suspects and trot out the usual categories (patriarchy, capitalism, domination) that obfuscate as much as they illumine...

...The family, in this scenario, is an arena in which male domination flourishes and violence is deployed routinely by the dominant...

...Examples like this one justify movement suspicion of the state...

...How do social "realities" become political "problems...

...Society as a whole expects men to be more violent than women and anticipates that women will be the more likely victims of aggression...

...At a time when many feminists are challenging the whole concept of "protection," Schechter proposes a sweeping reaffirmation of the notion...

...Who identifies and names "problems" and to what ends...

...Even so, her analysis is provocative...

...She proffers a double agenda: one for the "interim," before we have fully reconstructed our society's life, and a second for sustaining that reconstruction...

...Women and Male Violence indeed is a celebration of feminist volunteerism, highlighting more generally how our social life would be impoverished if such efforts dried up entirely, or were totally taken over by public policy and the market...

...57 The story, underscored by her theory, goes like this...

...Because she assumes that "total restructuring" will produce a moral consensus, she skirts problems of coercion and control otherwise implicit in the plan for hearing complaints and "dispensing" justice...

...And what implications for democratic politics more generally can be drawn from this instance of single-issue, grass-roots organizing...

...Since the 1890s, however, at least until the recent feminist wave, family reconciliation became the byword, coupled with temporary emergency housing outside the home...

...That is, concentrating upon the reality of battering, she correctly detects a pattern of predominantly female victims and male victimizers...

...Schechter sets her theoretical sights very high: she wants to explain nothing less than the causes of and the solutions to male violence...

...But she regards such reliance as a mixed blessing, and she documents instances of the negative ways in which government agencies move in on movement terrain...

...Schechter consistently speaks of violence against women "under capitalism," but she has no real analysis of how, through what social forces, and in what arenas and institutions capitalism requires or reinforces such violence...

...At long last, however, after theoretical critique and political challenge, it is well to be 60 reminded of the horrible fact with which Schechter begins—that millions of women are being beaten in this society at this time...

...For example: Evan Stark, Anne Flitcraft, and William Frazier document the 1830s and '40s, the late 19th century, and the 1970s as three periods when battering was on the rise and various attempts were made to control it...

...Women are not as "capable" as men of battering with fists and feet: here brute strength remains a major advantage...